At my happy place

I didn't last very long in town before I just had to come back to the oasis. Watered some, and then played at getting a better photo of the Allen's Hummingbird. I moved the feeder into the sun so I'd get a faster shutter speed, but alas, now my camera won't zoom in Shutter priority mode.

I don't know if I messed up a setting or it malfunctioned. It does malfunction, but to what extent, I don't know, since I'm not good with the technical stuff. I even reread the manual today, but nothing I did helped. The other day it zoomed fine in Shutter mode.

I'll try some more tomorrow. I"m on the verge of buying a Sony Cybershot RX10 III. It's not the latest model and I'd buy it used, so not too big an investment. My Lumix is a very good camera. I just think mine has been dropped too much. Getting it wet when I fell earlier this year probably didn't help. I'm hard on a camera because I have to keep it handy on me while I'm working so I don't miss a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

There were about 2000 vehicles headed toward Alpine this morning after the annual Chili Cookoff. Thank goodness I was going in the opposite direction. I'm told there were anywhere from 20,000-50,000 people at the cookoff, so my estimate was probably low. I arrived at my estimate by calculating that I was on the highway for one hour and the cars were spaced an average of about two per block for 60 miles. I figured it was like that all morning (4-5 hours) but it may have been all day and more.

Looking north

Looking south